Nest launches in Australia but skips out on the smart thermostat
Nest's smart smoke alarm will be available, but there's no sign of the company's signature thermostat product.
Google/Alphabet-owned Nest has announced the availability of its smart home products in Australia, headlined by the Nest Protect, a smart smoke/carbon monoxide alarm that uses spoken word alerts as well as an app-controlled interface for managing alerts and checking power status.
Nest's claim is that the Nest Protect checks its own status some 400 times per day, obviating the need to manually check the alarm, a step many users bypass or simply forget about. The Nest protect will sell in Australia for $189 outright with no ongoing subscription fees.
Nest will also sell two different home monitoring cameras, similar in concept to existing products such as the Netgear Arlo system or Belkin's Netcam HD. The Nest Cam Indoor offers motion monitoring with 1080p recording and infrared vision for darkened scenes and will cost $319 outright, while the Nest Cam Outdoor comes at the same price point with inbuilt weatherproofing for detecting threats outside the home.
Both the Nest Cam Indoor and Nest Cam Outdoor models work with the Nest App, but to make the most of them you'll need to subscribe to Nest Aware, a $14 per month service that allows for cloud backup and alert services over the month. The first month of Nest Aware is free, but after that if you opt not to subscribe, you'll only be able to see quick alerts from the last 3 hours of activity, and then only if you specifically log into the app. That's not an uncommon move for most smart camera devices, however.
Nest has not opted to bring its signature Nest Thermostat to Australia, apparently due to the relatively low number of homes in Australia with the required central heating systems that would make the Thermostat device work, although it hasn't explicitly ruled out launching the product further down the line. The Nest devices are available from today through iSelect. The smart home market is expanding rapidly in Australia, with Google also planning to launch its Home device in the near future.